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Nudging towards COVID-19 and influenza vaccination uptake in medically at-risk children : EPIC study protocol of randomised controlled trials in Australian paediatric outpatient clinics
Get PDFIntroduction: Children with chronic medical diseases are at an unacceptable risk of hospitalisation and death from influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infections. Over the past two decades, behavioural scientists have learnt how to design non-coercive ‘nudge’ interventions to encourage positive health behaviours. Our study aims to evaluate the impact of multicomponent nudge interventions on the uptake of COVID-19 and influenza vaccines in medically at-risk children. Methods and analyses: Two separate randomised controlled trials (RCTs), each with 1038 children, will enrol a total of approximately 2076 children with chronic medical conditions who are attending tertiary hospitals in South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria. Participants will be randomly assigned (1:1) to the standard care or intervention group. The nudge intervention in each RCT will consist of three text message reminders with four behavioural nudges including (1) social norm messages, (2) different messengers through links to short educational videos from a paediatrician, medically at-risk child and parent and nurse, (3) a pledge to have their child or themselves vaccinated and (4) information salience through links to the current guidelines and vaccine safety information. The primary outcome is the proportion of medically at-risk children who receive at least one dose of vaccine within 3 months of randomisation. Logistic regression analysis will be performed to determine the effect of the intervention on the probability of vaccination uptake. Ethics and dissemination: The protocol and study documents have been reviewed and approved by the Women’s and Children’s Health Network Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC/22/WCHN/2022/00082). The results will be published via peer-reviewed journals and presented at scientific meetings and public forums. Trial registration number: NCT05613751
Universal jurisdiction : law out of context
No full textUniversal jurisdiction enables the prosecution of international crimes by domestic courts in the absence of any nexus between the prosecuting state and the crime charged. While the temptation is for domestic judges to proceed with ‘business as usual’ in the conduct of such trials, difficulties in the practice of universal jurisdiction reflect the importance of developing a better understanding of the distinctive communities, interests, crimes and cultures these trials are intended to serve. This article seeks to develop this understanding and, in doing so, to advance a coherent theory of universal jurisdiction. It rejects the idea that universal jurisdiction is an aspect of sovereignty, as is the case with other accepted bases of jurisdiction (for example, jurisdiction exercised on territorial, nationality, passive personality or protective grounds). Universal jurisdiction is not an exercise of domestic jurisdiction but represents a form of ‘international jurisdiction’, exercised as part of a state’s contribution to the enforcement of international criminal law. In legal terms, universal jurisdiction should be understood as a licence by the inter-state community to universalize the right of access to justice for victim communities in relation to crimes of concern to the international community, albeit where this does not disproportionately affect the interests of the prosecuting state. This re-conceptualisation has implications for the way in which domestic courts engage with many of the challenges facing universal jurisdiction trials, including problems of community, case selection, proof and culture
Romantic opportunism : doing the work of structures in post-feminist creative industries
Get PDFThis article contributes to feminist cultural studies on the creative industries by offering an ethnographic account of the lifeworld of a female and creative entrepreneur. Drawing on interview data and ethnographic observations collected over the course of 10 years, I offer a thick description of the personal and professional trajectories of Alexandra, through the rise and fall of her fashion brand and first marriage and on to her second marriage and new job as an employee for a marketing firm. I focus on the ways in which she becomes her own microstructure, building connection between love and career in a de-regulated and de-territorialised environment. I argue that she engages in what I call ‘romantic opportunism’, a biographical device that enables her to spot instrumental connections between different dimensions of life, whilst unifying them into a romantic plot. The story of Alexandra can therefore be seen as an instantiation of ‘freelance feminism’, whereby life emerges as the combination of parallel and interdependent projects
Roaring to softly whispering : X-Ray emission after ∼3.7 yr at the location of the transient AT2018cow and implications for accretion-powered scenarios
Get PDFWe present the first deep X-ray observations of luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT) AT 2018cow at ∼3.7 yr since discovery, together with the reanalysis of the observation at δ t ∼ 220 days. X-ray emission is significantly detected at a location consistent with AT 2018cow. The very soft X-ray spectrum and sustained luminosity are distinct from the spectral and temporal behavior of the LFBOT in the first ∼100 days and would possibly signal the emergence of a new emission component, although a robust association with AT 2018cow can only be claimed at δ t ∼ 220 days, while at δ t ∼ 1350 days contamination of the host galaxy cannot be excluded. We interpret these findings in the context of the late-time panchromatic emission from AT 2018cow, which includes the detection of persistent, slowly fading UV emission with ν L ν ≈ 1039 erg s−1. Similar to previous works (and in analogy with arguments for ultraluminous X-ray sources), these late-time observations are consistent with thin disks around intermediate-mass black holes (with M • ≈ 103–104 M ☉) accreting at sub-Eddington rates. However, differently from previous studies, we find that smaller-mass black holes with M • ≈ 10–100 M ☉ accreting at ≳the Eddington rate cannot be ruled out and provide a natural explanation for the inferred compact size (R out ≈ 40 R ☉) of the accretion disk years after the optical flare. Most importantly, irrespective of the accretor mass, our study lends support to the hypothesis that LFBOTs are accretion-powered phenomena and that, specifically, LFBOTs constitute electromagnetic manifestations of super-Eddington accreting systems that evolve to ≲Eddington over a ≈100-day timescale
Assessing the engagement of participants at a pre-Christmas son et lumiere in Liverpool Cathedral : a study in the individual differences tradition
Get PDFRecent studies have drawn attention to the variety of events, installations, and activities within Anglican cathedrals that hold the capacity to attract wider publics into these iconic buildings where common ground and sacred space collide. In order to assess the engagement of participants at a pre-Christmas installation in Liverpool Cathedral, this project designed seven measures of engagement (styled as Christmas engagement, Cathedral engagement, Spiritual/religious engagement, Personal engagement, Imaginative engagement, Positive engagement, and Negative engagement). Data provided by 562 participants explored the effect of personal, educational, psychological, and religious factors on predicting levels of engagement across these seven measures. Two core findings were that the Luxmuralis installation, The light before Christmas: The angels are coming exerted its greatest impact on younger people and on those who did not attend church services. In this way, not only was the Cathedral extending its reach, but delivering an experience that enticed them to want to return
Coordinated transcriptional response to environmental stress by a Synechococcus virus
Get PDFViruses are a major control on populations of microbes. Often, their virulence is examined in controlled laboratory conditions. Yet, in nature, environmental conditions lead to changes in host physiology and fitness that may impart both costs and benefits on viral success. Phosphorus (P) is a major abiotic control on the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus. Some viruses infecting Synechococcus have acquired, from their host, a gene encoding a P substrate binding protein (PstS), thought to improve virus replication under phosphate starvation. Yet, pstS is uncommon amongst cyanobacterial viruses. Thus, we asked how infections with viruses lacking PstS are affected by P scarcity. We show that production of infectious virus particles of such viruses is reduced in low P conditions. However, this reduction in progeny is not caused by impaired phage genome replication, thought to be a major sink for cellular phosphate. Instead, transcriptomic analysis showed that under low P conditions a PstS-lacking cyanophage increased the expression of a specific gene set that included mazG, hli2, and gp43 encoding a pyrophosphatase, a high-light inducible proteinand DNA polymerase respectively. Moreover, several of the upregulated genes were controlled by the hosts phoBR two-component system. We hypothesise that recycling and polymerization of nucleotides liberates free phosphate and thus allows viral morphogenesis, albeit at lower rates than when phosphate is replete or when phages encode pstS. Together, our data shows how phage genomes, lacking obvious P-stress related genes, have evolved to exploit their host’s environmental sensing mechanisms to coordinate their own gene expression in response to resource limitation
Completing priceable committees : utilitarian and representation guarantees for proportional multiwinner voting
No full textWhen selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of represented voters) of the selected committee. Previous work has studied the impact on utilitarian welfare and coverage when requiring the committee to satisfy minimal requirements such as justified representation or weak proportionality. In this paper, we consider the impact of imposing much more demanding proportionality axioms. We identify a class of voting rules that achieve strong guarantees on utilitarian welfare and coverage when combined with appropriate completions. This class is defined via a weakening of priceability and contains prominent rules such as the Method of Equal Shares. We show that committees selected by these rules (i) can be completed to achieve optimal coverage and (ii) can be completed to achieve an asymptotically optimal approximation to the utilitarian welfare if they additionally satisfy EJR+. Answering an open question of Elkind et al. (2022), we use the Greedy Justified Candidate Rule to obtain the best possible utilitarian guarantee subject to proportionality. We also consider completion methods suggested in the participatory budgeting literature and other objectives besides welfare and coverage